


pattern recognition

by foxlives



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: 5x06, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 00:43:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3589875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/foxlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She thought the pieces went one way and it turns out she'd been wrong all along.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pattern recognition

**Author's Note:**

> probably too late to be rightly called reaction fic, but ah well.
> 
>  **warnings** for reference to canonical rape.

The police station is bright and raw, just familiar enough to be unnerving. A puzzle with the pieces shoved together wrong, the same plastic chairs and sad-looking silk plant and cinderblock walls. Debbie feels the same way, stuff she thought she knew — that Ian was the careful one, that Fiona would always be there in a crisis — finally and irrefutably proven wrong.

Lip goes to tell Carl what's going on, and she and Mickey sit next to each other, silent. She's still not sure what to do with Mickey, doesn't know which version of him to trust to be the real one. The Mickey who used to be neighborhood-legendary for running drugs and beating on anyone who crossed him; the Mickey who'd always steal from Ian's store; the Mickey who stayed in their house last winter and finished all the good cereal. Or the Mickey who'd showed up at their door freaked-out and asking for Lip; the Mickey who'd hung out with them last summer, always silent and wary-looking next to Ian; the Mickey who driven here with them, saying _i'm sorry_.

It's all fucked-up and confusing and Debbie just wants to go home, not the house as it is now but the home she used to live in, a few years ago, with all her siblings still there and laughing. The safe feeling she used to get being in it. She knows it wasn't as good as she remembers it being, knows that Fiona was always tired and Lip was always mad and Ian was always gone. Knows that she and Carl were too young to really understand how fucked-up everything was then, even if they'd understood a lot. Still. Sitting in a police station in Terre Haute, her phone's call log full of unanswered calls to Fiona and Ian locked away somewhere inside this maze of white walls and painted bars, she wants more than anything to just go back.

 

Ian's let out and he looks bad, he looks wrong. Blank and wrung-out and washed-out under station lights. When Lip hugs him Ian practically falls against him, like he doesn't know how to stand up on his own anymore.

Debbie hugs him. She's hugged him hundreds of times before and thought hugging Ian was something she knew, but this Ian is strange and unfamiliar. He leans into her a little but doesn't hug her back. She remembers the officer telling them Ian had had to be sedated, and makes herself pretend it's only that.

She bumps into Mickey as she's backing away, and she thinks about saying something dumb like _sorry_ but he doesn't seem to have noticed, pushing forward and taking Ian's face in his hand. Ian looks at him — looks at one of them, finally — but there's nothing there, or if there is, it's too far away to show. 

Mickey hugs him tight and then the officer is calling him over to take the baby and Lip puts his hand on Ian's back. It looks like he has to push a little to get Ian to move, like Lip has to show Ian how to walk again. It's a perversion of what they'd always been, never one without the other, _lipan'ian_. Now they look foreign to each other, cold.

She straightens her blouse, the perfect blouse she'd picked out for her perfect first day of high school, dulled now under her boring everyday hoodie and her scraped-back hair. Sixteen hours away and a state over, that version of her life seems unexplainably far away, some other day lived by some other person. Someone who worries about things that aren't runaway brothers, absent sisters.

 

The ride home is choked and quiet, all of them sitting cramped and uncertain. Debbie'd taken the baby from Mickey, offered with a shrug and as much of a smile as she could come up with, and he lays now a warm weight in her arms. Lip's eyes keep flicking up to the rearview, and Debbie makes herself count out sixty seconds between looks over her shoulder. Ian's unchanging, staring straight out the windshield with his odd expressionless face.

She remembers seeing him in that club, for the first time in months. Colored lights sliding over everything, Ian's hair gelled back and his shirt thin and sparkling. When Lip had asked her if she really wanted to come Debbie had thought he was trying to protect her from the places they'd have to look in, crack dens and gutters and shitty bars. She'd thought he was overreacting, being overprotective to make up for being away from them so much. But then. Watching the way Ian moved, the way he wouldn't quite meet their eyes. She'd wondered suddenly if what he'd been protecting her from really had been Ian, all along.

Ian had smiled too wide then, too big. Not Ian's real smile, not the one she had remembered on her remembered brother's face. When they were little it was always Fiona they'd go to first if they needed something, Lip next in line. They'd come up with something, usually, Fiona with her soft mom voice, Lip with his easy promises to steal whatever they needed, beat up whoever deserved it. When it was Ian left to deal with their problems, though, he wouldn't usually say anything: just smile softly, hold his arm out for them to curl under.

That smile was gone, though, switched out for something else. His eyes bright in a way she knew too well, growing up with Frank and Monica. His whole face had seemed lit up and glittering, eerie. She'd been so glad for Lip's comforting presence next to her, suddenly not wanting to be grown up anymore but instead letting Lip handle this like he'd always handle things when she was little. Wanting someone familiar, faced with one brother gone strange.

 

Now it's the opposite. Eyes still drugged, but dull this time. His mouth a pale line, too thin to smile at all. Debbie wants to stop looking, but she doesn't think she can.

It's an hour, less, before Ian falls asleep, his head tipped on Mickey's shoulder. It's another hour before anyone says anything, and it's Mickey, talking about hospitals and jail and, fuck. She thinks about Fiona. She wishes Fiona was here.

Then it's Lip, saying _you did the best you could_. He doesn't sound quite like Lip, sounds the way he does around Fiona now. Like the grown-up. It's strange, but no one in this car is quite themselves right now. Nothing is the way it should be.

Then it's Mickey again, a few minutes later, saying "Ian?" too soft. It makes her want to look away.

Ian wakes up slow, like it hurts. Debbie watches silently over the back of the seat, the unfamiliar pale leather of Lip's rich girlfriend's car. She holds the baby to her chest, tight.

It's Lip who says, "Ian?" next, sharper than Mickey had. His jaw is set. "You feel okay, man?"

Ian nods, blinking a few times.

Lip's knuckles are bloodless where they're wrapped around the steering wheel. "We're taking you to the hospital," he says flatly. "The psych ward, Ian. You're gonna sign yourself in, and they're gonna hold you for seventy-two hours. Okay?" It's not a real question, just a cue for Ian to nod. Like when they used to carry out schemes and pranks, to get shit or just for fun, Lip planning and Ian nodding, doing whatever Lip said. Like Lip thinks that'll still work.

Ian looks to Mickey. "Mick—" he says, the first real word they'd heard him say since they got him back. He doesn't sound much like anything, voice almost as blank as his face, but if he does sound like anything he sounds pleading. 

Debbie understands suddenly why Lip was the one to say _hospital_ in that flat voice, to ask _okay?_ like it wasn't really a question. Making himself into the bad guy, letting Mickey off the hook. It's something Fiona would've done, once.

"Ian," Mickey says, "you gotta. You gotta understand—" He looks out the window for a second, looks back to Ian. "This shit with the kid and everything, man, we gotta figure out. Gotta figure out what's up with you."

Ian's face is less blank now but Debbie doesn't know if that's better. He looks guilty, a little, and confused, and angry, nothing quite coming to the surface. It's more familiar than she'd have liked, not the same, but _familiar_ — what she's felt for weeks now, ever since the party and Matty and everything. Like no one will tell her what she did wrong, but she knows it was wrong and she knows that she did it and icy shame clutches at her stomach whenever she thinks about it, but she still doesn't understand _why_.

Carl's been staring at Ian fixedly this whole time, same as Mickey and Debbie. Lip's still watching through the rearview, and Debbie wonders if that makes it easier for him, steering wheel under his hands and Ian only a reflection of their brother.

Carl nudges Ian with his shoulder. Ian looks over at him, slow, like he's moving his head through something thick. Carl nods, earnest, with his face that only Debbie knows means he's about to cry, mouth pinched tight at the corners.

Then, "Ian," Debbie says, not really sure what she's going to say but wanting to give Carl time to look away, blink rapidly. But she can't think of anything good, can't think of anything at all, so she just smiles, small but real. 

She's not sure if he remembers back to them being kids, that outstretched arm and easy smile, there to solve all their problems. She's not sure if anyone remembers that except for her. Sometimes she feels like the only one who remembers lots of things, her family changing around her and her the only one holding onto what life used to be like.

So she smiles at Ian, and hopes he remembers, but even if he doesn't she hopes it helps. She hopes he gets better. She hopes he figures out how.

Ian nods a little, and he doesn't smile back yet, but that's okay. That's okay.


End file.
